LARAMIE'S living HISTORY - PEOPLE

A series of stories prepared for the Albany County Museum Coalition, an alliance of institutions that promote Laramie’s historic and cultural resources. This series originally appeared in the Laramie Boomerang.

Arriving Laramie in 1908 to study civil engineering at the University of Wyoming, Hitchcock worked as a carpenter and began designing homes while still an undergraduate. He had learned carpentry and home building from his father in Springfield, South Dakota where Wilbur was born in 1886.

There was a time when Laramie was nationally-known as a bicycle-friendly town. “Our streets were even known to be among the best maintained in the Rocky Mountains for cycling” says Dewey Gallegos, co-owner of the Pedal House of Laramie.

The rugged high country of the northern Laramie Mountains is home to a rare columbine that grows nowhere else in the world. Equally noteworthy, this plant was discovered by a young man embarking unexpectedly on a botanical career, an accidental botanist who would become the “Father of Wyoming Botany” -- Aven Nelson.

On October 23, 1907, William Lepper, a one-time Laramie property owner, shot and wounded a man before turning the gun on himself. His victim was popular local lawyer, Judge Charles Bramel who died four days later.

For many years in Laramie the name Thornburgh was very prominent. As early as 1880, the name of the finest hotel in town, the Union Pacific, had been changed to Thornburgh. In 1889 when the east-west streets in town were renamed, one of the most important was called Thornburgh Street. Who was the person they were named after and what was the connection to Laramie?

It is a widely-repeated story that Laramie’s first mayor, Melville C. Brown, was elected on May 12, 1868 and resigned after three weeks in office because the town was “ungovernable.” But, is the story true?

In a 1902 eulogy for the 75-year old Hayford, rival newspaper editor, E.A. Slack of the Cheyenne Daily Leader, wrote “We never knew a newspaper man …more a master of ridicule or sarcasm…[but] the longer we knew him the more we appreciated his fearless advocacy of what he believed to be right.”

Lake Owen in the Medicine Bow Mountains, which is actually a reservoir now and part of the City of Cheyenne’s water supply system, is probably named for him. More well-known is “Mount Owen,” the second highest of the Teton Range, named in recognition of his climb to the top of the Grand Teton on August 11, 1894. Owen had first seen the Tetons after a bicycle trip through Yellowstone in 1883 and resolved then to climb Grand Teton peak.